Viralheat adds Zendesk integration, boosting social customer support for brands

Enterprise social management platform Viralheat seems to be playing nicely with a lot of new friends — it has just added Zendesk integration after recently partnering with Salesforce.

“We incorporated Zendesk into our platform so our clients could take advantage of the converging fields of social, sales, and support,” said Viralheat CTO and cofounder, Vishal Sankhla in a statement. “The volume of online conversations surrounding businesses and large brands continues to grow, and many of these conversations detail a consumer’s issues, questions, and feelings of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a particular brand or service.”

While many customer support solutions have already integrated company social media accounts as support channels, this new partnership goes in the opposite direction. Here, the idea is to enable social media managers to spot customer support needs that might not have gone through the brand’s dedicated support channels. This approach should also help brands intervene in cases where consumers air grievances through social media.

Viralheat has already integrated Salesforce into its platform, signaling that the company is well aware of the range of opportunities brands can find in social media conversation, from customers’ issues to possible sales leads. This is a solid step in furthering its efforts to help its customers make the most of social media conversations.

For its part, Zendesk is a customer support platform that has long understood the need to play nicely with social media channels, offering several social media-based apps, integration of Facebook and Twitter accounts, and even its own API for maximum customization.

Viralheat is based in San Mateo, Calif., and was founded in 2009 by Sankhla and his cofounder Raj Kadam. To date, it has raised a total of $4.33 million, including $75,000 in seed funding and a first round of $4.25 million from Mayfield Fund.